Isolated Skills or Multiple Skills?

 

We are coming off about ten years of teaching skills in isolation.  At the time, it seemed like a sound idea. Struggling with the main idea? Spend more time on the main idea. We spent a lot of time focused on three-week units around one skill. But what teachers noticed was, it didn't work! They still didn't get the main idea!!!

       Fast forward to 2019 and the Science of Reading movement....the first book I read that changed my thinking was Natalie Wexler's the Knowledge Gap.   I will spend another blog post synthesizing takeaways from this later.  In all honesty, this book made sense to me. Why weren't the kids getting these skills in isolation? We had taught many, many lessons on them!  Wexler says it's not because of the skill, it has more to do with the information in the text they are reading. If you have no background knowledge, then you can't decipher the meaning of the text.  

      Students need to be exposed to multiple skills in a passage or story because the complex text is multi-faceted.  Think about the last book you read.  Did you only concentrate on the main idea? Or did you think about the characters and how they interacted together? Was the setting so descriptive that it almost was one of the characters itself? Was the conflict something that kept you up at night while you wondered how it would end?  This is where the true understanding of a text happens - not by just focusing on one skill. 

     But what about the idea of close reading - how does that fit in? Well, in essence, it matches multiple skills perfectly. My school has adopted a literacy curriculum that uses close reading for students in grades K-5.  It teaches literacy units around one central topic or idea and all the books connect to and build upon that idea. Next, the stories are read aloud (yes, read aloud) to the students the first time. As we do the read-aloud, we ask questions that help the students understand what the text says.  The next days, we go back to certain portions of the story and look deeper at how the text works and what the text means.  Our students may work collaboratively to answer these questions or you could continue to answer them,  in whole group discussions. 

     Does this work? Absolutely! In the first year that we switched to this model out, State Mandated Reading Test scores were one of the few schools in our district to increase, while everyone else decreased. Did I mention we were able to start this during the pandemic last year? In our second year of teaching this way, our STARS scores are making 30+ point growth from beginning to mid-year. 

       I realize that we are very lucky that we have this as our curriculum.  But not everyone does.  So I have decided to create some resources for close reading that include stories in a text set that are based around one topic. This will help to build background knowledge! Questions will be based on the Depth of Knowledge levels and will be higher level.  Students will look at the language and analyze sentence structure as well as respond to the readings. 

      My first resource that was created for a three-week literacy unit is for K-2.  It is called Animals in Winter. It integrated science and literacy as well as critical thinking. 

I'd love to know what you think! 

Leslie